Fleet Street fire leaves 26 homeless
TWELVE families — 16 children and 10 adults — were yesterday left homeless after a fire swept through their tenement homes at Fleet Street in Southside, Central Kingston.
There were speculations that the fire, the second in that inner-city community since the start of the year, was caused by an electrical short circuit.
“If you go out on the street, you can see where the wire burn off,” said one resident, who added that the blaze started where the electrical wires were connected.
Another resident, who claimed to be an eyewitness, said the fire started in a small room inside the house at number 22 Fleet Street, then quickly spread to other houses at 24 Fleet Street, exacerbated by the explosions of two cooking gas cylinders.
Maxine Love, her common law husband, and their four children, are among those who have lost everything and will have to find a place to sleep until they can afford to rebuild, or rent somewhere else.
“Everything gone, everything,” said Love, hugging her daughter, who was asleep inside the house when the fire began, and who narrowly escaped after neighbours pulled her from the blazing plyboard shanty.
“We only glad say she neva bun up cause things can get back, but life a different suppem (something),” she said, shaking her head in despair.
Diovanni Pitt, pastor of the Zion Fellowship United Baptist Tabernacle, was among those who lost all his personal belongings.
Last night, he and his grandmother, Emmett Ramsey, prepared themselves to sleep inside the church, a small wooded building with an ill-fitting zinc roof tucked in the back of the yard at number 24 Fleet Street.
“A deh so all a we a go sleep tonight, I only hope rain nuh start fall, cause den the whole a we a go wet up,” he said.
Meanwhile, corporate communication manager at the Jamaica Public Service Company, Winsome Callum, said illegal connections to power lines were an almost certain recipe for disaster.
“The service is distributed at different voltage levels, and you get your service at 110, and so if people make connections to the wrong line, the high voltage lines, or even to the 110, its very dangerous, and fire can result when improperly installed wires come in contact with each other, or when frayed or exposed wires come in contact with the grounding,” she said.